Which is correct verb?
The most obvious and intuitive choice would be “lies.” That’s because it’s almost unknown to use the subjunctive in English anymore, especially in the context you’ve laid out. However, be it the case that you’d like to use the subjunctive, then “lie” would be correct; similarly, one could say things like: “Should he stop changing the oil in his car, he ought to wash his hands before coming into the house.” or… “My wish is that the quiche rest gently upon the stove where I’ve left it until the company comes.” However, if you use the subjunctive in the sentence you’ve given about answers which lie, please know that you’re using a somewhat awkward way that won’t really be understood by most English speakers, at least in the US. My experience is that English really only uses the subjunctive conditionally or tentatively anymore; that is, after a “should,” a “could,” or a “might.” Short answer: yeah, that’s the subjunctive, but nobody uses the subjunctive for that in English anymore.
Spicynuts wins it; that’s a concise and fine way to answer it. A note to Paleography; I see what you’re saying, but it avoids the question really, as in the subjunctive one would find occasions where a “singular” noun would take a verb without an “-s” ending, such as “lest he fall.” The subjunctive is tricky in English, since it rarely affects form and few people seem to know or care much about it. Thanks for the help; I’d avoid this structure too, but it’s something I’m mildly correcting (not my own work) and I don’t want to mess with it too terribly much.
The subjunctive is tricky in English, since it rarely affects form and few people seem to know or care much about it. Correction: The subjunctive no longer exists in English, thus few people seem to know or care much about it. There are fossilized phrases like “if I were you” that used to contain a subjunctive back when English still had a functioning subjunctive, but that was a long time ago. Now they’re learned and used as units, just like “spic and span” or “gone with the wind.” Note that the people here who are trying to explain it don’t know much about it: While the subjunctive in English isn’t terribly well-documented, it’s used in essentially the same cases as in most Romance languages like Spanish Wrong and wrong. It’s as well documented as anything else in English, and its use was not like that of the subjunctive in the Romance languages. Not that any of this is relevant to the question, because the given sentence would not take a subjunctive in any language I’m familiar with.
Among the given choices, lies. But I think a clearer, simpler sentence would be “I expect that the answer is not in the answers provided, but . . . ,” or “I expect that the answer is none of these, but rather…” or even “I expect that none of the answers provided are correct.” This throws off native English speakers all the time too. So IMHO there’s no good reason to use language with a risk of either making a mistake –or– having your reader who doesn’t know that it should be “lie” and thinks that you’ve made a mistake. In English, the best answer to “which is correct?” is often “Just use a simpler construction” or “Avoid those phrases since they’re cliches anyway.” Frex, the best usage of “begs the question” is not to use it at all. At best, it’s jargon for the sake of jargon, since the phrase “assuming you mean to prove” is available. At worst, it’s a cliche.
